Tag: Bill Haley

Social Distancing Spins – Day 48

by thedailyrecord, posted in Album review, review

By Joel Francis

Bill Haley and his Comets – Bill Haley’s Greatest Hits (compilation) I hope the flower child on the cover of this album is enjoying Haley’s early rock and roll hits. At just 11 songs, this collection seems a bit skimpy at first glance. Thankfully, it contains all of Haley’s major hits: “Rock Around the Clock,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “See You Later, Alligator.” The other eight tracks are a mixed bag. “The Saints Rock and Roll” is a rocked-up version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” A cover of Louis Jordan’s “Choo Choo Ch’boogie” is fun, if inessential. The songwriters of “Skinny Minnie” and “Razzle-Dazzle” put all their energy into coming up with a rhyming title and forgot to write a decent song to go with it. Then there’s “Thirteen Women (and the Only Man in Town),” a bizarre fantasy about being the only man to survive the apocalypse and finding himself with a baker’s dozen willing women. It may be the best non-hit on the album. After all is said and done, 11 songs seems about right.

Janelle Monae – Dirty Computer (2018) The third album from Kansas City, Kan., native Janelle Monae is a triumph. She pays tribute to her late mentor Prince, while also capturing and commenting on the political landscape. To a president who boasts about grabbing women, Monae bluntly warns “if you try to grab my pussy cat, this pussy grab you back” (on “Juice”). To the war hawks, Monae threatens “we’ll put water in your guns/we’ll do it all for funs” (on “Screwed”). The music is as carefree and fun as the lyrics are serious. The hit Prince tribute “Make Me Feel” provides a break from the politics and is a definite highlight, but the album closer “American” plays like another tribute to the Purple One. Against an arrangement that sounds lifted from Around the World in the Day, Monae describes the vision of America she is fighting for. If a dance party happens to break out en route, well, that’s part of the plan, too.

Ramones – self-titled (1976) One, two, three, four and away we go into a new landscape of rock and roll. Part surf, part rockabilly, part girl group pop and all fun. The 14 songs on the Queens-based punk band’s debut album rocket past in less than a half an hour, barely pausing to catch their breath. Many of the Ramones’ best songs can be found here – “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Beat on the Brat,” “Judy is a Punk,” “53rd and 3rd” – and what isn’t appears on their next three albums. These songs are so imbedded into our lives today it’s hard to imagine the furor they generated when first unleashed on an unsuspecting world. We’re all the better for it, from the grizzled punkers who gobbed and pogoed to this music back in the day, to the tweener girls who rock Ramones t-shirts. God bless the Ramones.

Talib Kweli and DJ Hi-Tek – Reflection Eternal: Train of Thought (2000) Talib Kweli’s debut with Most Def as Black Star is so well-regarded that fans are still clamoring for a sequel more than 20 years later. Train of Thought established Kweli as a serious thinker and talent on his own. The spirit of the album is best encapsulated by the African proverb Kweli quotes on “Africa Dream”: “If you can talk you can sing/If you walk you can dance.” Working with a pastiche of neo soul, jazz and African rhythms, DJ Hi-Tek keeps the listener’s feet busy. Kweli works just as hard on the cranium, celebrating his ancestry, praising women, critiquing hip hop, contemplating love and so much more. Train of Thought never gets too heavy, though, thanks to Kweli’s deft lyrical flow and Hi-Tek’s soundscapes. This album was my go-to quite a while after it came out. I hadn’t listened to it for a while before today, but was instantly reminded of why I loved it so much. A classic.

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Releasing Jazz from Aspic

by thedailyrecord, posted in Industry commentary, Kansas City music scene

(Above: Ornette Coleman jams with the Roots. Improbably, people respond positively to the non-traditional collaboration.)

By Joel Francis

In 1958, Danny and the Juniors sang “Rock and Roll is Here to Stay.” Although the genre was only seven years removed from the its birth on the “Rocket 88” single and three years from its explosion into the mainstream with Elvis Presley, Danny White was right. Sixty years later, it is hard to imagine American culture without rock and roll.

It is also hard to imagine what the malt-shop teens and leather jacket hoods of the Eisenhower administration would have thought about auto-tune, power pop and nu-metal. Although the seeds of today’s rock were planted in the 1950s, the resulting flora has blossomed into hybrids that bear little resemblance to the original crop.

Picture how different today’s musical landscape would be if anything that varied from the pre-British Invasion strains of rock and roll were bastardized. If songs bearing the touch of John Lennon and Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were decried as impure for straying from the “true” roots of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.  Or if anything after the summer of punk and the rise of synthesizers was kept at arm’s length and segregated from the great Rock Cannon.

Would we expect our children to dig out old Bill Haley and Beach Boys albums if this were the case? Teach them “Fun Fun Fun” and “Maybelline” as historical exercises? Of course not. They would shrug, pay us lip service and invent their own confounding strain of music. The ties to existing music would be obvious – nothing emerges in a vacuum – but nothing we couldn’t dismiss as the impure follies of youth.

Why, then, do we place the same parameters around jazz and feign surprise with then inevitable occurs?

It seems every year a new study comes out showing the median age of jazz listeners climbs while attendance drops. The latest is a National Endowment for the Arts Survey of Public Participation in the Arts conducted through the U.S. Census Bureau. Predictably, the self-appointed Guardians of Jazz like Wall Street Journal columnist and former Kansas City resident Terry Teachout are freaking out. But all this hand-wringing is like an ordinary bicycle enthusiast fretting while the chain-driven model populates the streets. The vehicle is still very much alive, it’s just been modified and influenced by culture.

Too many jazz museums and concert curators suffer from WWWS: What would Wynton say. Would Wynton Marsails, the genre’s most prominent performer and steadfast caretaker, approve of their exhibit or event? While Marsalis is a talent trumpet player who deserves every bit of his fame and credit for bringing jazz to the masses, he is conservative and traditionalist to a fault. Museum directors and concert promoters should be following their own muse and vision, not looking to someone as restrictive as Marsalis for tacit endorsement.

The growth of jazz from Dixieland to big band to bebop is celebrated, but somewhere along the line – about 1965, shortly before John Coltrane’s death, when free jazz and fusion started to creep into the mix – a line was drawn. In shorthand, acoustic Herbie Hancock playing with Miles Davis and recording for Blue Note is “good” jazz; synthesizer-rocking Hancock’s best-selling “Head Hunters,” though, is “bad.”

If directors and promoters must get the thumbs-up from a Marsalis, could it please be Branford? Although a lesser celebrity, the tenor saxophone player and older brother of Wynton has equally distinguished jazz pedigree. He’s also allowed jazz to grow, branching into pop with Sting, serving as musical director for the Tonight Show and working with hip hop artists.

If the stodgy stylistic caretakers turned up their noses when jazz artists, the highest pedigree of musicians, started dabbling in rock and funk, they have completely ignored most jazz performers slumming with rappers in a genre oft-maligned for possessing the lowest level of musicianship.

The elitists are missing the point. At their best, jazz and hip hop are better together than chocolate and peanut better. The improvisational aspect of jazz fits the free-flowing poetry delivered by a great MC. The swing of the instruments matches the swagger of the beats. Dig the way DJ Logic’s turntable work complements Medeski, Martin and Wood’s “Combustication” album, how Mos Def and Q-Tip’s rhymes soar over Ron Carter’s live basslines, or how Roy Hargrove’s trumpet pushes and accentuates Common’s poetry.

Teachout and Wynton Marsalis’ simplified stances ignore the long history of jazz in popular culture. The enduring standard “Someday My Prince Will Come,” was plucked from Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Although both Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong released albums of Disney material, it is doubtful Wynton Marsalis would record a song from a children’s cartoon.

The Chicken Little jazz forecasts don’t show that jazz is less popular or interesting today. The news they bring is even more disturbing: hard evidence that the standard-bearers of the genre are increasing ignorant to how their beloved music has grown, changed and been embraced. They’re the ones missing the party, but don’t worry – their numbers are dwindling.

(Below: More Ornette Coleman with the Roots for all the alarmists. Note how well the musicians play together despite being from the disparate worlds of jazz and hip hop. Surely this is a sign of the apocalypse.)

The Day the Music Survived

by thedailyrecord, posted in Music history
(Above: “True Love Ways” is The Daily Record’s favorite Buddy Holly song.)

By Joel Francis
The Daily Record

Fifty years ago this week, the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed in an Iowa cornfield, claiming its passengers and 22-year-old pilot Roger Peterson.

The event became known as “The Day the Music Died,” but the fact people were still talking about it 12 years later when Don McLean memorialized the moment with the song “American Pie” proves that music indeed survived.

The rock landscape had changed a lot between 1959 and 1971. The pioneers of the rock and roll were having hard time. Chuck Berry had bounced from Chess to Mercury and back and was seven years removed from his most recent Top 40 hit (although the No. 1 “My Ding-A-Ling” was right around the corner). Carl Perkins was performing as a sideman in Johnny Cash’s band and Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino and Bill Haley dismissed as washed up. Only Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis retained a whiff of their ’50s fervor, but it took a televised “comeback” special and a genre hop to country and western for them to manage the trick.

That Holly was not only remembered, but celebrated in the aftermath of Woodstock and Altamont, in an era where rock’s excesses were just starting to steamroll, was not pure nostalgia.

Far from killing rock and roll, Holly planted the seeds that allowed it to flourish. Holly was one of the first artists to recognize the recording studio as creative environment, by experimenting with double-tracking and overdubs. He was the first songwriter to pilfer the Bo Diddley beat for “Not Fade Away.” He was the first rock and roll star to play a Fender Stratocaster, the guitar of choice for Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and countless others.

Although the Beatles often receive credit for being the first group to write their own material and put strings on a rock album, the truth is, Holly did both nearly a decade before them. It’s not a big leap from Holly’s “Raining In My Heart” to McCartney’s “Yesterday.”

But the most amazing of Holly’s feats is that he did it all by 22, an age at which Bob Dylan was just emerging from his Woody Guthrie fixation, Brian Wilson was begging out of tours because of stage fright and Neil Diamond was still trapped in the Brill Building.

Few mourn other ’50s rock casualties, like Eddie Cochran, who died a scant 14 months later, but Holly’s influence continues to be felt today. It’s  in Elvis Costello’s spectacles, Weezer’s Top 5 1994 hit, and the myriad of bands – ranging from the Rolling Stones to the White Stripes to the cover band in the bar around the corner – who regularly drop “Not Fade Away” into their sets.

The day the music died? Not even close.